My 19th Ayahuasca ceremony had drawn to a non-dramatic yet truly painful close. We had all assembled around the burning candles and cozied up close to the Shaman. Stories were revealed. Revelations and struggles laid across our laps like blankets. No matter how nightmarish the journey may have been, we felt cocooned and safe. The hard work was over that night – it was time to sleep.
Best Friend and I shuffled into my massive bedroom, and as I walked to the king-sized throne, I felt the emptiness of Orion’s absence. I instinctively grabbed my cell, and was happily shocked to find 8 text messages waiting. All from my beautiful partner.
Orion doesn’t fancy himself a very intuitive soul. He doesn’t sense that he’s all that connected to energies, or anything outside of the tangibles. I may disagree, but that’s irrelevant – his perception is reality.
This evening, however, something rather unexpected happened – he was present for the ceremony, without physically being in the room. Through his texts, he revealed that in the midst of a deep meditation, he could literally feel what I was going through with Ayahuasca. His pulse remained at an unusually high level for the exact duration of the ceremony, and that became the tangible evidence of this energetic connection – without which he would have failed to believe in the link. His timing was impeccable – the intro and exit texts matched the start and ending of the experience almost exactly; information he could not have known otherwise.
Orion had been there all along. I knew this, and yet knowing in the default space as well, I just felt overwhelming peaceful.
I called him immediately, and we had a brief but beautiful discussion. I shared what I could about the night, as did he, and basically I just gushed about how much I loved him, us, our connection. I don’t believe I would have been able to face such primal fears without his encouragement. Sometimes it takes a cheerleader that reminds you of your strength. He was / is that gift.
Best Friend and I laid in bed talking after the phone call, recounting the evening’s events and lamenting the next go-around. We were tired. The night was hard on us both, in ways we knew we would benefit from. But night two loomed above us like a storm cloud, so we said our loving night-nights and escaped into slumber, sourcing the power for day two. My twentieth ceremony was hours away.
